Lab 1-Intro to R

First things first. Download and install the most recent versions of R (http://cran.r-project.org/) and RStudio (http://www.rstudio.com/ide/)

(1) The first lab is our chance to get everyone more or less on the same page with R. There are a million guides to R of different lengths and various emphases. To keep things simple, we are going to use the guide that Ben Bolker used when he was teaching from his book. I have crossed out a few things that were irrelevant for us, but the rest of the PDF is unchanged.


You will also need to download data and scripts for lab 1 from Ben Bolker's website: http://www.math.mcmaster.ca/~bolker/emdbook/

This is a long guide, so let's prioritize.
Section 1 -- read the background if you're interested.
Section 2 (Interactive calculations) -- make sure you understand this well.
Section 3 (getting help) -- skim, and see our own wiki for help
Section 4 (First Interactive Session: Linear regression) -- work through carefully, but don't worry too much about the graphs as we'll devote the following lab to this
Section 5 -- skip... we will cover this towards the end of lab
Sections 6 & 7 -- skim
Sections 8 & 9 (Vectors and Matrices) -- work through carefully. This is an important, but sometimes tricky bit for those new to R.
Section 10 -- Read through this, but we'll see more about data frames soon.

(2) I want to get everyone on the same page as to what RStudio can do and how we are going to organize our analyses.
I will do a little show-and-tell towards the end of the lab period and walk you through the workflow we will use in class.